Note: I've read the following two questions already:
Can you explain the concept of streams?
I'm coding in C#
I'm currently building a class in my application that contains a primary method (lets call it GetStream()
) that returns a stream via myWebRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()
The primary method GetStream()
returns a Stream
object that can be used for any operation that requires a stream (StreamReader, Bitmap() etc.).
Is there a way to have the stream Disposed of automatically after its last use (garbage collected?) without forcing anyone that calls .GetStream()
to manually dispose of it?
As you can probably tell, my questions are vague and general. My understanding of streams is not solid, so any links to helpful articles that offer a more in-depth look at streams than a SO question can offer would be appreciated.
Disposing a stream closes it (and probably doesn't do much else.) Closing a stream flushes it, and releases any resources related to the stream, like a file handle. Flushing a stream takes any buffered data which hasn't been written yet, and writes it out right away; some streams use buffering internally to avoid making a ton of small updates to relatively expensive resources like a disk file or a network pipe.
You need to call either Close
or Dispose
on most streams, or your code is incorrect, because the underlying resource won't be freed for someone else to use until the garbage collector comes (who knows how long that'll take.) Dispose
is preferred as a matter of course; it's expected that you'll dispose all disposable things in C#. You probably don't have to call Flush
explicitly in most scenarios.
In C#, it's idiomatic to call Dispose
by way of a using
block, which is syntactic sugar for a try-finally block that disposes in the finally, e.g.:
using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(path))
{
// ...
}
is functionally identical to
FileStream stream;
try
{
stream = new FileStream(path);
// ...
}
finally
{
if (stream != null)
stream.Dispose();
}